The blended wing body (BWB) aircraft is a tailless design that integrates the wing and the fuselage. The conceptual advantage of this configuration lies in its lower wetted area to volume ratio and lower interference drag as compared with the conventional transport aircraft. A BWB has an additional advantage: lift and payload are much more in line. This reduces blending moments and therefore structural weight. The concept goes back to nonconventional flying wing designs originally proposed almost 60 years ago (Northrop, J. K., 'The Development of All-Wing Aircraft', Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Vol. 51, 1947, pp. 481-510). The BWB configuration concept is a radical change from the dominant design where a wing is combined with a cylinder-type fuselage, and the longitudinal stability of the aircraft is maintained by means of a tail. In this paper, the authors present the results of one- and multipoint multiconstrained optimization of a blended wing body configuration for minimum total drag. The optimization technique includes a new strategy for efficient handling of nonlinear constraints in the framework of genetic algorithms, scanning of the optimization search space by a combination of full Navier-Stokes computations with reduced-order methods and multilevel parallelization of the whole computational framework. The assessment of the results shows that the proposed technology allows the design of feasible aerodynamic shapes that possess a low drag at cruise conditions, satisfy a large number of geometrical and aerodynamic constraints, and offer good off-design performance in markedly different flight conditions.
Computational fluid dynamics driven optimization of blended wing body aircraft
Optimierung von Nurflüglern mittels numerischer Strömungssimulation
AIAA Journal (online) ; 44 , 11 ; 2736-2745
2006
10 Seiten, 27 Bilder, 2 Tabellen, 26 Quellen
Article (Journal)
English
FLUID DYNAMICS - Computational Fluid Dynamics Driven Optimization of Blended Wing Body Aircraft
Online Contents | 2006
|CFD Driven Optimization of Blended Wing Body Aircraft
AIAA | 2006
|CFD Driven Optimization of Blended Wing Body Aircraft
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2006
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